Last year, Ancestry announced "Smart Search" in beta, intended to be a more intuitive search form with "enhanced logic" for focusing on more relevant results. It has shown up on my family trees and last week, I tried it for several ancestors, some I knew little about and some I know lots about.
One of the striking things about Smart Search is the way results are formatted into three main categories: People (basically, family trees), records (mainly historical documents), and photos (user-submitted and records-based). This makes it easy to focus on specific types of search results.
While I like the formatting, and the multiple filters (see red arrow above), I don't really see any major improvement compared to "classic search." Above, the top "records" result for my hubby's great-grandpa, Edward George Steiner (1830-1880). Nope, not him.
The top photo results using Smart Search were gravestones of this ancestor. Yes, that's him. If I want, I can filter by location, date, and other elements (see red arrow above).
When I switched back to classic search, the top overall results were gravestone photos and his name in birth records of his children. Correct. Remember, Ancestry knows I already have many sources linked to this man, and therefore its search technology attempts to avoid dupes.
When I filtered classic search results for "family trees," he was shown in 48 different trees. My tree, which is referenced first, has more sources/records than the other trees, but still I checked other trees in case there were fresh clues.
So far, I haven't found a compelling reason to use Smart Search, but I'll continue experimenting. Do you use Smart Search? What do you think?
